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tv   [untitled]    December 18, 2012 11:00am-11:30am PST

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continue to work with cities across america to get more open data sets released, to the question about the history and we really look to recent examples to see the dura power of open data sets. my favorite examples are weather when weather data was released, weather channel.com and many others, and gps global positioning system. we know the history there was the military infrastructure that liberated public consumption and use, but the things we expected such as navigation, but also things that people didn't necessarily anticipate in the beginning such as precision crop farming which lowers the cost of food in the supermarket ultimately. so, the question is now what is the next gps, what else can be done? how can the federal government work with cities, with platforms like cities.data,.gov and other systems like that. how can we liberate some of this data while also protecting privacy and confidentiality which is hugely important and something that we're seeking to celebrate and support in a way our customers which i'm sitting alongside here, for the entrepreneurs and the organizations that are using
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consuming this data to turn them into real value. that is something that is very significant priority for the administration and that's why the president launched an open data initiative to support. >> let me dig a little more on the federal side. can you talk a little more about the work that you specifically are doing and sort of, you know, how the department of energy when it became interested in open data, what is available right now? >> there is so much available for start-ups right now. it's hard to choose a few favorites. wow, i can tell you what some of the best ones that people have told me are the most popular so that will be like many other things in the start-up world, it's not the government that is going to come up with the answer. it's partners working together to find the solution. so, one data set that comes to mind, i want to do a show of hands. i get this question a lot in terms of how much of the work is getting out there. how many of you have ever heard of the green button, a green button? most of the panelists and audience members. it's a good thing we're here.
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it is a initiative launched by the white house but industry led. you should be able to get your own energy data in a machine readable format you can then give to companies, organizations like the ones being celebrated here today to provide real value to you such as saving money, improving energy efficiency, and protecting the environment. so, the green button here we are in san francisco, i can say with some public comfort that pg&e is a signatory to the green button, download my data. and basically you go to the utility website. you can download your own green button data which by itself is, well, i'm an energy guy, an energy geek. i consider with confidence. it is not interesting, necessarily, but when you take your green button data and you give it to some companies, they have amazing things they can do with that green button to, again, save you money. something as simple as if you look at your green button which is kilowatt hours for those that are engineering minded, a line grab if you think about t some companies today can look at your green button and figure out if your refrigerator is broken function need a new air
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conditioner. that's real money if you think about it at a commercial or industrial scale. that is one data set. to your other question about what is the federal government doing, we're seeking not just an energy, but across the government to engage entrepreneurs and innovators across all the different sectors. for those of you familiar with the history of the health data initiative launched by then the hhs health and human services chief technology officer todd park, we sought to have a health data palooza proceeded by health data jambs or modeling sessions, jams sounded more fun, we can invite entrepreneurs in and see what can be done and created real products within a few months. that is being rolled out at education, energy, treasury, u.s. aid, other agencies as well. these programs are celebrating the use of open data and hopefully will provide some additional support. i think there are even folks here who have been part of these events. we're excited for that continued support and hope you can all join this initiative in
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the neutral. -- future. >> so, earlier you were talking a little about kind of how san francisco came in in terms of actually ading the officer. more broadly how do you think san francisco compares and what are some of the other cities that are doing really well in terms of open data? >> i should be clear. when san francisco is third, we have a pact. i'll add to that actually. what's great in san francisco is there is not just going to be a chief data officer. there is also the office of civic innovation. jay's team, shannon's team. by having both of those units in place i think there is going to be a really powerful team. because you can't just open up the data. you have to do things like this, where you get the community together or you have people actually talking about it because the demand side, as we were talking about it, will be there because there is going to be someone there. there have to be people working with it who are getting out there. i think this is what this city is going to be really powerful. in terms of other cities doing as well, chicago is doing some
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really interesting stuff. scary cool stuff. they're taking 3 in 1 data, pothole request and crime report and matching it up with social media. they're getting this really deep and rich picture of what is going on in the city. and you can do that with data when you think about it creatively. philadelphia as i mentioned, they are really active in open data. and new york, again with 3 in 1 is doing smart analytics. i think that's what you'll see happening as well, government starts to become smarter, make better decisions, better policies. this term algorithmic regulation, which means you can have laws and policies in the cities determined by data and not just what we think is best, but what's actually best. so, as cities keep catching on and more and more with the data, you're going to see some really interesting things coming out. >> cool. while we're talking about data, another part of the announcement today was also motion loft making private data available within sort of that initiative and that website
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wrieri'd like to hear a little more, john, about kind of deciding to share that data with the city and also a lot of times especially with other companies you see them being very protective of their data. there is a lot of value there. how do you sort of balance, protecting the value of your data and commercial viability versus making it available to the public? >> so, we have a unique problem, i think, to a lot of start-ups in the fact that we have a product that we sell and a lot of different vertical. we also have data we want to provide to the society at large. and how do we not step on our own toes and give away our own data and make the company worthless. so, it's tough. it's a definite fine line between the two. today we announced that we're going to give crowding data to the city so you'll know where crowds are in the city and when they occur and where they occur. and that really isn't commercially viable for us.
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so, something we can provide to the city without any repercussions financially, which is great. we want to do more of those things. i made the decision to release this data about three minutes before a speech that i gave at spur a couple weeks ago. and literally, yeah, i was committed obviously, jay took me up the second i said t we have to go talk now. okay. so, jay walked it down. i think jay is great for partnering with start-ups as much as he does. >> great. who can be the other start-ups, people using the data to make products. you already talked about what you actually made. i'd love to hear more about the experience of working with the city's data like, you know, other things, like services or data points you would actually like -- would make it better and you can sort of take that. whoever has an answer ready can go first.
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>> and i have a microphone. i wanted to say this earlier and it kind of slipped my mind. we have the most amazing experience working with the city over the past just really the few weeks in building this application about urban growth. one at the data portals, it has a rich repository of information. but working with -- we had lots of questions, right. something maybe there were attributes or information that wasn't necessarily documented to the extent we wanted. and we asked the question, we would get these immediate responses with really insightful conversations that would come out of it. i think that type of collaboration is only going to make the portal better. the more people use it the better it's going to get. we also experienced some challenges, you know. we did a lot of work with the data. we did a lot of data, put things together. we did things like added value, added certain locations. and i would love to be able to
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pull that back up to a shared community portal. from what i can tell it wasn't necessarily promoted at this time, but i think there is a lot of value in that. and shannon, interrupt me if i'm speaking -- if that's -- if i'm stating anything that's incorrect. you know, i know that they went through a special process. maybe we make it a little easier, a little more seamless so that anybody is pulling down data and doing things, they can't push it back up. that was one of the things we would love to see. >> probably shouldn't have been in public, but we were very naive about the whole process and we were actually trying to feed content locations around the city. and started to do this and started to think there must be a list out there. there must be a list of every park in san francisco. i would find it in wikipedia. we stumbled into the sf data website and started looking.
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it was unbelievable, actually. so, some of the data sets we really needed were already there in very, very good format. and random things that i would never think of like movie set locations in the city of san francisco or every piece of civic art that was there, just really interesting things all with, you know, latitude-longitude, tags and information about them. it was really interesting. and then in my first meeting, in our first meeting with the innovation group, the city i heard of 10 other things that i clearly should have been using and didn't even know existed, literally within the first 15 minutes of the meeting. ss things like street safety, sidewalk safety scores and quality scores so we could wrap people around places. * route people around places. really unbelievable. we availed ourselves of resources going forward. we had the same -- like any data set, you find great things about it. then there's missing values or is thisxtion that got auto populated. we fixed a lot of things.
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we fixed a lot of gps coordinates. we would love the ability to post that back up * . even if you're not crowd sourcing new things, you can definitely crowd source quality of a data set that way. >> yeah, it's been a really great experience working with 100 plus and motion loft. just to respond, i think that this is a whole new opportunity actually what you're talking about. in addition to reaching out to the private sector to generate more data sets as you just mentioned, there's also the opportunity to have better data sets from the work that you've done, scrubbing them and harmonizing them. i think there is also this really great opportunity to generate whole new types of data sets like motion loft is doing. and i think that this is going
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to present something kind of back to the city, showing where some of our gaps are and hopefully filling in some of those gaps with those data sets. so, i think that there is something about having more city data sets, existing data sets as well as creating new types of data. this is really exciting for us. >> we're going to tell a quick story on how private data can stimulate civic innovation. this summer in singapore, we had about 30 data sets opened p. up. one data set was about a million or so records of taxis all over town. typically taxi data stuff, it's hard to get, private companies, they don't want to open it up competitively. one taxi company at the last minute opened up, motion loft made it efficient to see what would happen. because they contributed to the stuff, we had five separate teams working on could we do collaborative consumption of sharing taxis, build a dash panel for companies to know
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where to go. had i hatch i had been working on a model to see how much overlap there was. they sent us to tokyo to work on that. so, this one set, a million records of where the taxis were not only led to a lot of innovation, but people realized 15% of all taxi routes kind of where people went, about 15% of that was all overlapped. so, a city that never really thought about collaborative consumption or sharing suddenly is looking at that. parking data was opened up similarly about a million records of where people weren't parking and within a couple of days predictive analytic app was written. go to a parking reservation thing. the carrier local phone company released pairs of where people were all over town. a lot of privacy issues. we wrote a contract around that. all of that led to a huge amount of innovation and new forms of thinking. and even as i look at what goes on with teams working in san francisco stuff, the minute for example i saw the esri data
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that has tons of economics and social behavior behind t i realized sometimes you come together and work on something, and lacking that stuff you make assumptions, you make things up. you don't have a rich set of data. the fact there is a place to turn either because it's free or you can go pay for it, but it's kind of normalized and available i think just speeds things up, reduces redundancy and that's going to be the thing that leads it a real burst of innovation and value both financial value for developers, but also civic value for where we live and clearly we're at the very beginning of that. and i think san francisco has been pushing ahead and that's why it's exciting. >> i'm going to give you a chance to talk about his experience in a second. first i'll open it up for questions from the audience in just a second. think of anything you want to ask our many panelists up here. all san franciscans. i'll give the panel to ask each other questions if they want. talk about your experiences working with san francisco. >> sawyer, i could barely here you. >> sure, could you talk a little what your experience is like working with san francisco
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and, you know, other things that you'd like to see that have become available in start-ups that aren't already. * sorry >> so, we started navigating the city of san francisco or working with the city of san francisco close to 2-1/2 years ago after our initial concept. we realized about two years ago we discovered the innovation office. we discovered sf data sets, and we were absolutely delighted to have the resources available to us through these offices. and they really were the driving factor behind our development moving forward. obviously they weren't exactly where we needed them to be at that time, and we had worked with multiple departments now on cleaning up the data sets obviously. and then putting that back out there. one of our biggest pin points or struggles has been with the legislation and the old models
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of the [inaudible] the regulations and laws which are being slowly worked on through the legal departments and the san francisco's legal department. but essentially we found the experience through innovation office has been driving the initiatives through and helping us develop and the data sets have bon become cleaner. they have become easier for us to use and the process has become a lot more efficient. >> school. -- cool. i was told if you have a question you should line up at that microphone right there. if you're coming up -- no, he did youant [speaker not understood]. >> i don't have a question. i wanted to comment on this. i think something else is really unique and maybe one of the untold stories or not told so much stories about the impact of open data is really
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the companies that are being formed. and as you mentioned earlier, they're a sustainable company and this is being powered by open data and motion loft is figuring out how they can share the asset that sort of your business model is built on. so, i think that this is presenting a whole new type of question for sort of apps built with government data or public data. >> i guess i'll jump in once here, too, while people are stepping up. we've been doing this for awhile now. one thing we've learned in this innovation space, people matter. like you can build technology you want, platform you want, that's great. it's the people who are doing it that matter and they're going to get stuff done. this has some of the best people, shannon and jay are doing t. they've been doing it awhile so they know what they're doing. it's great. last year i was building this adopted tree app and i found it on the data portal. it had like some weird geo data like it was in some form i couldn't use.
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i just dropped jay a note and like within 24 hours i got the data fixed and it was perfect. so, it's those kind of relationships that matter and having the right people in place. so, i think the chief data officer, these guys will end up joining a rock star team. >> not a question, but just a comment to say thanks to the city's innovation office. we're a small company from ireland called building i. we take permit data from cities and show it to anyone who wants to see it. we started off in ireland, discovered the san francisco data and came over here and now we've got an office up and running here with san francisco data. so, it's great to be able to do that. just one note of caution of how do you prevent kind of third-party data integrators from owning that data. i think jay was talking about it earlier on. it's just a note of caution for you guys. >> how do we prevent vendors from holding the data? >> yes.
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>> we're still working on this piece with our legal department. we're looking to do and this is very exploratory right now, really looking at the contracting process itself and how we can use that as a mechanism. basically we want to do business with you if you're willing to share your data. as jay mentioned we don't want to be held hostage. we don't want our data to be held hostage to the companies. as we figure this out, we'll continue going about it and providing updates. yeah, i think that there's actually a lot of companies out there that are being powered right now with our open data program. so, if there's any that aren't represented here today, please let us know. we would love to feature you. because this is the other story that i was talking about. open data is demonstrating economic growth and job creation. so, yes, it's about transparency, yes, it's about openness, but it's also about creating jobs and this is a really exciting piece of the story. >> we have another question.
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>> thanks, everybody, great panel, great things going on. i have a question around strategies that you guys are facing to monetize somehow this data. of course, having companies that create applications and then they sell these somehow is fantastic. but is government thinking about ways in which they can directly monetize these data sets? >> can i say one quick thing first? i remember we were at the white house innovation panel and there was this exact conversation came up because we are looking to monetize everything we do. and the city is also looking to monetize this and make revenue. one of the biggest conversation pieces that came out of the talk and some of the questions from the crowd was opening up apis for transactions, permitting, reservations and those type of things, which would be an incredible influx of private industry working with governments and also providing incredible efficiency
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for the public to be able to make these transactions. i'll probably say that ian might want to talk more on this, but that would be something that would be highly encouraged from the private sector and from my company specifically. >> that's a great point. and i'll say the short answer to your question is the federal government is trying to not charge for this data. the way we did was with tax dollars. you already paid for it, we're trying to give it back to you. and, so, we take a wholesale retail. we want to be the providers of the data as a fuel, but fuel, gasoline is useless to get you from point a to point b unless you consume that ultimately drives value to the american economy. our customer, i can completely agree with what shannon said in terms of our business objective, so to speak, is to empower entrepreneurs and innovators, to create jobs. that's a metric of success, not revenue generated per data set or some other per ifervance metric. the other piece of that looking back to the example of weather
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and gps, my monetization, is that together they contribute $100 billion to the american economy last year. last year alone from just those two data liberations. so, that is the way in which we are approaching from a strategy perspective, the ultimate impact to our customers. >> one super quick. one thing the city of san francisco or big cities or federal, right, the other smaller cities, smaller cities have smaller budgets. having a structure to support all this open data takes a lot of money. so, when these small cities are thinking about this, they should think about a way of somehow equalizing because they are putting into having these open data team, right? so, what does make sense? this is kind of an open question to get your point of view. >> do you want to take that, shannon? >> i think that there is actually quite ah few examples.
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we can probably talk to this more with smaller cities that are making open data efforts. but what i would say is that it's proven more than the value of the investment. the return that we've gotten just by opening up the data has actually given back more. so, that would be my short answer to it, but i think you probably have more experience working directly with some of the cities. >> so, i grew up in a small city so i care about small cities a lot, 15,000 people, southern illinois. i'm a card nastionv fan. -- cardinals fan. i should say that. the city of santa cruz, for instance, it's a smaller city. they're a leader in open data. they've been doing this for a long time. the working with the city of make on, georgia, they're doing it as well. * macon. the smaller cities are taking advantage of easily reusable solution thextion, right, so open source technologies that make it easy for them to make a data catalog, and they're bag
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borrowing and stealing whatever they can from the bigger cities. whenever we get the chief data job description up, we should put that online and the city can take that. you can see cities sharing resources so that way even if they don't have the resources themselves, they can work together and pool those resources. >> maybe just to add one more thing to that, when we passed our legislation in 2009, we actually documented and shared our best practices for how we laid forth this program for other cities to use as well. >> great. so, i think we've actually already gone significantly over what i was hoping. i was hoping to [speaker not understood] also. we're going to wrap it up. thanks to all our panelists and the hatchery for hosting us. anything else you need to say before we wrap up? okay, wrap up. (applause) >> >> oh. >> if anyone would like to support the federal open data movement please follow us at twitter project open data all one word, or check us out on data.gov. (applause) >> thanks.
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>> >> >> frantic shoppers around you may be in need of a break from the festivities and have no fear i will count down the places that will add fun to the
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madness. if you're in good of a good laugh stop by for free comedy night and food and drink speciallies. come laugh the night away at 8:00 p.m. sharp. after that get your skate grove on in your finest black and white duds. join the godfather of skate and his party crew this thursday at the skate night. skate to the funk and rolear disco and say the words "i love skating" and get a discount at the door. maybe the star party is your cup of tea and socialize and get tips about the night sky and from san francisco's picturesque land's end and the skies the limit. that's the
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weekly buzz. visit us >> hello, my name is jamie harper. in this episode, we are featuring the park locations in your very own backyard. this is your chance to find your heart in san francisco with someone special. golden gate park's largest body of water is this lake, a popular spot for strolling and paddling around in boats, which can be rented. created in 1893, it was designed
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foreboding and -- for boating. it is named for the wild strawberries that once flores. a pleasant trail follows the perimeter past huntington falls, 110 foot waterfall. two bridges connect the trail to the island. the climb to the hills summit, the highest point in golden gate park at more than four hundred feet. you can get quinces of the western side of the city through -- glimpes of the western side of city through a thick trees. the lake is ada accessible. it has a peaceful atmosphere where you can enjoy a warm day. walk along the lake and watched many ducks, and swans, and seagulls.
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it is a tranquil spot to stroll, enjoy each other's company, and sail away. many couples come here to take a ride around the lake, floating under the bridges, past the pavilion and waterfall. for a quiet getaway, it makes for a memorable and magical experience. located on 19th avenue, this grove is the place to wear your hiking boots, bring your family, and bring the dog because it has so much to offer you and your loved ones. it is a truly hidden gem in the city. the part is rich with eucalyptus trees. long paths allow you to meander, perfect for dog walking in